Changes are coming from Canada Post:
The cost of mailing a first-class letter within Canada went up to 85 cents today — a 35 per cent jump from the 63 cents it previously cost.
At the same time, it also revealed plans to phase out door-to-door mail delivery over a five-year period to the millions of urban Canadian homes that still get it.
It’s about time direct delivery to residences is gone. Twice a week might be a good idea. Snail mail is pretty much obsolete and I see no good reason for taxpayers to subsidize it.
Twice a week is plenty for sure. I mailed 2 letters today and the cost was $2.38…..crazy isn’t it. I do everything my the internet but I had to send some forms to Ottawa and I guess they don’t do internet too well….haha
They will trot out the old cat ladies living in Kensington Market with their frozen property taxes and multi million dollar coach houses and their cats and will die crying about having to walk to get mail because they are agoraphobic and kitty cant stand to be alone. Ever wonder how sanitary it is to have an old geezer with mrsa or vre or C-difficile licking their letters? Yikes!
I’d accept it once a week, but 90% of the mail I get is UCBM, and I keep a recycling bin beside the door for that.
I still get home delivery, but I could easily rearrange my affairs to not miss it if I didn’t have it. Once a month to a neighbourhood box wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.
Unnecessary overpriced “service” – I’d not miss it as most is just junk mail that goes straight in the garbage.
Never did trust those letter carrier people – I watched our guy for five years and he didn’t provide daily service at all – he brought mail on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursdays he did something else.
It’s the underfunded liabilities from days of yore when taxpayers were still bottomless pits. Read Union fat cats being forced to go on a diet.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/cash-strapped-canada-post-asks-government-for-a-cheque-in-the-mail/article13989680/
This is the inevitable result of a technological transition. The writing was on the wall with the last postal “strike” which no one really noticed. I’m hard pressed to imagine anything routinely delivered to me by mail which I couldn’t receive electronically. I take the paper copy mainly for ease of filing and accounting come tax time, but realistically, even that could be done more simply by electronic means if I were to invest a bit of initial effort to make the change.
I guess the mailman is going the way of the lamplighter, though I’m sure the “progressives” at the union will, as usual, fight progress tooth and nail.
Our local post office is a week behind in getting mail sorted and into the boxes. I can’t see there being that much mail to sort when you’re dealing with superboxes throughout the city (which are on time, so I’m told). But of course, it’s Canada Post’s fault for cutting back on staff and expecting the remaining staff to cover the same workload.
All I know is that when they went on strike 3 years ago, I switched everything to electronic delivery, and I haven’t missed a beat since. I now have less than 20 pieces of mail delivered to me annually that I can’t change. When I empty my superbox box, it’s about 15:1 flyers and commercial to mail I want.
Prices go up, service (sic) goes down.
peterj’s absolutely right: It`s all about salaries, pensions, and benefits. 35% increase to send a “first class letter”? That’s total BS. You can`t send a letter 2nd or 3rd class. You have one option: “first class,” which isn’t in any way first class, or nothin’. It often takes weeks for a letter to arrive at its destination or it doesn’t arrive at all. First class, my ***. And try tracking a letter after you’ve spent well over $10.00 which comes with “the guarantee” your letter will arrive the next working day …
Union flunkies are making a killing on their salaries and benefits and no one’s making sure they do their jobs. They don’t have to do their jobs. They don’t have to be diligent about delivering Canadians’ mail. No one’s looking and no one’s calling them to account … while they screw up and nevertheless continue to rake in their inflated salaries and collect their obscene benefits.
What idiots we are.
Kyrie eleison.
Wait til people find out what a huge security risk these neighborhood boxes are. I would hire a PO Box before I’d ever use one.
Pfffffttttt. I’m all out of outrage today. What a waste that management are too damn stupid to wring the value out of the current business model. A 35% price increase during a drastic reduction in service? Only in the public friggin’ sector could that even be imagined.
LOL x 1,000!!!
** I watched our guy for five years….**
You need to seek help is all I have to say.
Actually, I think there is still a need for snail mail, especially for those that are not all that computer savvy like my parents and in-laws. I still use it occasionally myself, and I’d personally prefer to mail in my income tax forms at $3.00+ than pay $15-20 for the privilege of e-filing.
Having experienced the US Postal service for many years, I can say that Canada Post is no where near as efficient and that is not saying much at all. While super boxes are an eyesore and garbage attractor, I can see mail delivery being cut back to three times a week as being a cost savings. Also get rid of the unions.
With government you always pay more for less. Apparently now we’ll pay lots more for way less.
Thirty-five is a large increase in percentage terms, but we’re talking about the mail. It’s now going to cost an extra twenty-two cents to get a letter delivered a couple thousand miles away.
For a function as important as communication, the prudent course is to always have a plan b, in case a fails. Yes, national mail sevice is ” outdated ” and ” inefficient ” , but backup systems always are, because they exist to be redundant in ordinary circumstances. Chaos would reign if the Internet failed massively, and I personally don’t want to subject to the surveillance that comes with any form of Internet use wrt my finances, and other sensitive info.
Reform Canada Post/ US Postal Service, and their will be a backup for the Internet, with strong competition for UPS and FedEx in package delivery thrown in for free.
Magazine subscriptions are about the only things I need actual delivery for. I still get bank statements, etc., by paper but I can just as easily get them electronically. My Christmas list is largely switched over to e-mail greetings/letters, although many friends have resorted to Facebook for even that. Adios, Canada Post, the future is almost here.
This type of thinking is endemic to anything associated with ‘government jobs.’ Our city council just voted to pay what may be up to 300% more to continue having the RCMP (civilian employees) providing 911 dispatch services locally. We could have had E-Comm doing the job privately for 1/3 the cost, as they do in many other municipalities. We’re told due to the CUPE contract, the 5 local jobs can not be made redundant. And of course, if the jobs were done by the private sector in another jurisdiction “people may die because they(E-Comm) aren’t familiar with the geography.”
Also, in tonight’s newspaper, Hydro noted that fewer people turned off lights during ‘Earth Hour’ than last year. Our mayor’s response: “Conserving energy is a very serious matter so we at city hall need to spend more time and POSSIBLY MORE MONEY, making people more aware of it and the need to support it,”
Those Postal directors need a new 40% wage hike in their 7 figure salaries. It appears.
Union flunkies need the perks ,like free cars every year.Housing allowances ect.
Why should we pay these people when they have effectively no working people. Just a bureaucracy with some contract out work.
The rest just a bunch of fancy taste people who pretend to work.
More job titles for more patronage.
Only in Canada as far as I am aware must people put up with such poor service and at such cost. The problem is that it is another Crown Corporation, which pretends to be private but remains stuck on the public teat. Either privatise it or make it an essential non unionised service. It is the same with the CBC and all other Crown Corporations that compete with private industry while having the unfair advantage of public money.
Those stamps are only 85 cents if you buy in packages of 10. Individually, they are a dollar each.
So who really gives a damn if they lose home delivery ,I am 85 yers old and NEVER EVER had home delivery, For years I had to pay for a box in the post office , a mile from home,
We’ve had super boxes for about (what?) 25 years and they were a vast improvement over having to go to the PO to get mail.
Folks whine about all of the difficulties getting to a box vs home delivery. Whoever gets their groceries can get their mail too. As for the garbage issue. THAT is a function of people being slobs and no fault of the super boxes.
The “security risk” card had been overplayed. How is a locked mailbox less secure than an open letter box on the front stoop?
We mail so few letters, I have no problem paying 85 cents a few times per year. Falls under the general category of WGAF? ☺
Within 10 years there will be no post office anyway. We will not miss it.
CAS
Magazine subscriptions are the primary thing I get in mail. I also get my bills this way as I like to have a paper copy. As far as communicating via snail mail protocol, the number of packets sent via this protocol is a few/year. I also have a mail drop service which I use to get courier shipments sent to.
Whenever I look at my snailmailbox, it’s full of crap. Most of the crap that gets deposited there goes directly into garbage and have thought of putting my garbage can next to it with a large “junk mail goes here” sign.
Having a backup communication system is one reason to keep a home delivery service, but it should be non-union and private. What I don’t like about the plan for having centralized mail boxes is the much greater likelyhood of missing a rare important letter. If I had a mailbox located some distance form my house, I’d never access it. Once home delivery is eliminated, my plan for the mailbox allotted to me will be to take some crack sealant foam and totally fill the volume of my box thus making it impossible to put anything into it (would first put address of my mail drop location at back before filing the box with foam). Thus, someone else could toss all of the junk mail into the garbage and I get emails about when I have important pieces of mail at my mail drop.
Magazines are a major problem as I subscribe to a number of magazines which do have electronic copies of their issues but I far prefer reading a paper magazine than downloading the pdf file of the magazine onto a tablet to read it. Similarly, I do get small items snailmailed to me so it looks like it will be courier services for everything in the future.
Not sure what people who can’t afford to courier everything or pay for a mail drop service will do. Many of the elderly patients I see stubbornly refuse to learn how to utilize electronic communication and they’re the ones who will notice this the most. Medical offices will be hit hard as the standard means of contacting patients is to send a snail mail communication if attempting to access them by telephone for abnormal lab results or followup appointments fails. In the stupidity that only a statist organization can manage, it’s illegal to send medical information via email to patients in unencrypted form even if they agree to this.
While on the subject of obsolete means of communication, the telephone is next as 99% of the telephone calls which arrive at my home phone are spam. It’s gotten so bad that I never answer my home land line and when people need to reach me, they page me first and then I return the call. Cell phone spam is also getting bad enough that I turn off my cell phone and only turn it on when I get a page. That seems to irritate people who assume that I really want to pay $0.25 for a 2 word text message. I suspect that soon we’ll be back to paying a runner to deliver a message to a particular individual as all current communication channels collapse under the deluge of spam.
Good move. Those who use the mail service should pay for it. If prices must increase to meet expenses, then so be it. It shouldn’t be subsidized from general tax revenue.
I get no junk mail in my PO box; I simply signed a form to reject all advertising. There is no mail delivery to my residence, it’s not necessary. A roll of stamps lasts a long time, it’s not a big expense.
I have an answering machine on my land line. I don’t answer the phone, the machine does. This automatically screens all unwanted calls and fax attempts. People who want to speak with me leave a message and I call them, on my schedule not theirs. If they don’t want to leave a message then it wasn’t important enough for me to bother picking up either.
My old obsolete cell phone is for outgoing calls and messages. I turn it on when I want to retrieve any messages or make a call, otherwise it’s off. It has no GPS, camera, or games. It’s a tool, not a status symbol to be openly carried in my hand or played with like a toy.
Communication systems exist only for MY convenience.
I do not receive anything in the mail that I care about. All my bills are done on line …. all communication with friends and family … on line … all banking on line …. The only think that comes in my mail now are fliers and I don’t want them.
When I send (or receive) anything of value … I use courier … I do not trust unionized government workers … they have no responsibility or accountability for their work. They cannot be fired. There is no bottom line in anything government. They have been known to steal stuff.
Support private sector … get more for your money and ease the tax burden created by those unionized half wits.
I haven’t seen a mailman on Friday for many years. I don’t care if I ever see one again.
Oh ya .. I do not watch or listen to CBC either. More over paid union twits who support the forces of darkness ….. that would be the liberals and NDP. Because they are too stupid to understand conservative values that built the nation they enjoy and are weakening by their own weaknesses. But I digress.
Other than the abolishment of the long gun registry, I cannot think of anything our feds have done that has a positive affect on me or my life. Oh wait … I think Jason Kenny has been trying to keep out some of the wogs who immigrate here and beat their wives and daughters for being women and generally hate us for not doing so. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ….
The post office is beginning to make me think of a friend’s characterization of every insurance company’s dream business model: the customer pays premiums but can never claim.
The difference is that we actually seem to be approaching reality with the dream Canada Post business model: getting revenue for providing, er, no service at all.
There is no need to maintain a backup system for electronic communication failure. There are effective private courier systems which will react to increased demand.
This may prove more expensive on a situational requirement, but the individuals or their caretakers etc will bear the cost as needed, rather than carrying a redundancy funded by the taxpayers.
By the way relying on the private system means we will be returning to the original process and also to the system just recently changed in rural areas by changing contracts to Postal Employees with all the increased costs and expectations this brings. Cheers;
Agree with the idea of backup, small c, disagree that it should be a CUPW government operation. Private services already exist, Fed Ex, UPS, DRL, Purolator. They would adapt to delivering regular mail very quickly. They would provide mailboxes, special delivery, overnight at competitive prices. In other words, the Canadian Post Office is entirely replaceable, almost overnight.
All my working life I’ve either had to walk or drive to the post office to pick up my mail, big deal.
This is a great example of “positive” or “reinforcing” feedback.
The more people use the internet, the less they need to use Canada Post. This triggers reinforcing feedback:
The less people use Canada Post, the more expensive it gets to mail an individual letter, and the more Canada Post has to charge for stamps.
The more expensive stamps get, the less people use Canada Post. Rinse and repeat.